Fighting Fit?

Posted on by RoseIW

I’m not unfit: I can dance round a carnival route for two hours and still have energy left, perform a four-minute song-and-dance routine without breaking a sweat, I can engage in an intense sword-fight whilst delivering a heroic monologue without pause, and I can (usually!) partake in a one-hour Zumba class without getting too out of breath.

Why, then, when challenged with a 10-minute ‘fat-busting solution’ DVD, do I find myself gasping for air well before the ten minutes is up?

Fitness DVDs, I’ve decided, are not designed to make you feel fitter. In fact, I think their aim is to make you feel as unfit as possible, so that you go out and buy more fitness DVDs!

Woman doing sit upsTwo minutes in, I’m planking, I’m hurting, I want to lie down.

Three minutes, I’m doing a strange, twisted version of ‘put your hands in the air like you just don’t care!’

Seven minutes, I lose the will to continue and decide that the floor is the best place for me.

Ten minutes: “Good job!”

I look up from my face-down sprawl to see a cheery American giving me a thumbs up. She doesn’t look tired. Either she’s had a coffee-and-cake break between each segment or else I’m just bitter at discovering I’m not quite as fit as I thought…I suspect it is the latter.

For beginners, she said; I dread to think what she puts her advanced consumers through.

A few hours later, I was working my proverbial socks off in a three-hour rehearsal: singing, dancing, acting and barely stopping for so much as a swig of water.

It repaired a lot of the damage done by the day’s earlier fitness failings and it got me thinking. Fitness DVDs, I decided, are like clothes – it’s all about finding the right style for you, and not taking it to heart if what you’ve bought doesn’t quite fit. Unfortunately, unlike clothes, you can’t return them after you’ve tried them!

So, the next day, the fitness DVD went into a drawer to join its many predecessors.

I don’t intend to take it out again.

A Nervy Girl’s Guide to Online Dating…

Posted on by RoseIW

In January, I broke up with my boyfriend. We’d only been together two months but, sadly, that didn’t seem to matter to him when he proceeded to behave like a first-class moron. To give you an idea, he turned up at my house late at night and refused to leave until I came outside to speak to him…

Classy.

For the second time in a year, I found myself on the receiving end of a great deal of unpleasantness following my decision to end a relationship. For the second time in a year, an ex-boyfriend shifted his attentions to someone else in a very short space of time indeed, while I was left dateless and wondering what on earth I had done to deserve my new state of social exclusion.

What gives, dudes?

Anyway, I digress. Eventually, I signed up for online dating – by ‘eventually’, I mean five months later, in May. And by ‘signed up’, I mean my mother bought me a subscription after she got tired of seeing me moping about how I was probably going to die alone without even a cat for company.

As someone who was utterly terrified by the prospect of online dating, I read loads of guides on how to do it, but none really hit the nail on the head. So I’ve made the following five observations from the real world of online dating, to help any other nervous first-timers:

  1. Don’t be afraid to write people off for silly things: “Give everyone a chance,” said my mother, “They might surprise you!” – I’m sorry, but for a fan of good spelling the use of ‘your’ instead of ‘you’re’ is simply inexcusable. As is asking the same question three times because you’ve not actually bothered to pay attention to the answer.

2. Be as picky as you like: Don’t get on board with the try-something-new philosophy. If you know what you like in a person, tailor your profile and your ‘desirable qualities in a partner’ section to be as specific as it needs to be in order to find you a promising date. Don’t spend weeks messaging someone you don’t intend to go on a date with – it’s a waste of everyone’s time.

3. Take your time: If you’re a nervous or cynical (or both) online dater, don’t rush into a date just because you feel like you should. Why trek three hours across the country to meet someone that you’re only feeling so-so about meeting. Yes, it’s difficult to tell if there’s chemistry via your computer screen but, even online, there is such a thing as ‘courting’. One guy almost had me going on a date, until I didn’t reply for two days (I was working) and he saw fit to send a needlessly curt message saying the following: “I guess you’ve found your Romeo. Or you just don’t have time for me.” Out in one strike, my friend.

4. Don’t judge a man by his pictures: Look, he’s got a picture of him on a mountain, that means he’s sporty! Look, there’s one of him wearing a silly hat, he’s got a sense of humour! Ooh, look at that six-pack! Don’t be fooled by appearances. It almost goes without saying, but I’ve fallen into the trap once already – a pretty face and some crazy pictures doesn’t mean someone is reliable or charming or funny. Get chatting and keep your mind open.

5. A date doesn’t mean a relationship: It’s taken me three months to get this into my thick skull. You don’t owe any of these people anything beyond the courtesy of a message to let them know you’re not interested following a first date. Nor do you owe a date to every person you message. The beauty of an online dating profile is that you can block people if they get out of hand, you don’t have to face numerous people in person to tell them you aren’t interested and you can shut down your profile if you find that online dating isn’t for you.

As it turns out, online dating isn’t for me. But that’s another story…

Colour My World

Posted on by RoseIW

A friend of mine posted a picture on Facebook last week of her patio. On the table was a glass of wine, a plate of food and a colouring book. Not just any colouring book, either: The One and Only Adult Colouring Book.

I was curious but I left well alone: I’m a fully-grown and (almost) fully-functioning adult, I wasn’t about to start spending my precious free time colouring in!

But three days later, beyond stressed, decaffeinated and traipsing around Southampton, I ducked into Waterstones for a breather and there it was: The One and Only Adult Colouring Book, in pride of place on a display table in the centre of the shop, surrounded by colouring pencils, crayons and felt tip pens.

imageI must have stood there for almost half an hour, agonising over whether or not I could justify buying myself a colouring book, trying to remember whether or not I still possessed any colouring pencils with which to enjoy it.

Tearing myself away with the same argument as before, I continued on my way empty-handed.

By lunchtime the following day I had a book on order and had sharpened as many colouring pencils as I could find in my catastrophe of a desk.

When the book arrived, I thumbed through it with a residual sense of guilt: I’m a busy woman, with a fairly high-pressure job, a lot of deadlines and far too many lines to learn in what spare time I can snatch, why on earth had I spent my hard-earned cash on a pursuit I abandoned in middle school?

With my limited artistic capabilities, I settled on a fairly simple picture of a flower as my first engagement with this so-called ‘relaxation technique’ and selected a bright yellow pencil to kick things off.

Two hours later and I was still going, determined to finish my picture. I think I was sort of missing the point: I was getting agitated when I went outside of the lines and spent far too much time trying to choose the right colours and make it as close to perfect as possible.

imageEven so, I wasn’t thinking about the stresses of the day, about impending events or personal dramas. I was thinking about colours and which ones would look best next to each other, which picture I should colour next, which green would best set off that blue…

As a child, I was a perfectionist. As an adult, I am, if possible, even harder on myself about success and failure – anything less than perfect isn’t good enough and I have a habit of pushing myself almost to burnout on a worryingly regular basis. Or so my friends tell me. As far as I’m concerned, it’s perfectly normal behaviour!

The beauty of colouring in, of course, is that the colours are hard to erase once they’re down on paper – there’s no sitting in front of a computer screen for hours, adjusting this proposal and that proposal until you’re happy with it. You just have to give it a go and hope you’ve made the right choice; just pick a colour, go for it and damn the uncoordinated consequences!

And thus, there is one more colouring-in convert in the world, shading away her worries in a rainbow of colour. Mission accomplished, colouring book. Mission accomplished.

So Little Time

Posted on by RoseIW

Striding through London, heading for the Playhouse Theatre, I came across Big Ben. A giant, golden clock in the centre of London, framed by the London Eye and the Houses of Parliament, you can hardly miss it.

And yet one man, one of tens of thousands of suited and booted businesspeople power-walking around our nation’s capital every single day, managed to overlook the clock entirely. Standing at a crossing, he slipped his hand into his pocket, pulled out his phone and checked the time before dropping the gadget back into his pocket.

Flabbergasted isn’t a word I use very often, but it just about sums up my face as it looked in that moment. He checked the time. On his phone. In the shadow of Big Ben. And he wasn’t the only one.

A need for speed, perhaps? But surely, with speed in mind, it takes less time to tilt your head up and look at an actual, physical clock, than it does to go to the effort of finding your phone. Is the sight of that mammoth clock so everyday to the city-slickers of London town that it just doesn’t feature on their radars anymore?

It’s a sad testament to the hustle and bustle of modern life that we assume technology will automatically provide us with the speediest results, the most efficient of solutions and the best preservation of our precious memories…

I know I’m guilty of it at times. Mostly at events, where I have been known – not often, I might add – to stand with my phone held aloft, focusing on taking pictures as souvenirs rather than on making memories from the spectacle on stage, the atmosphere of the crowd and the company of friends.

Sometimes a memory is enhanced by not having 1001 photographs capturing every moment that you missed in person.

It’s a lesson often learned the hard way: all it takes is for one tiny blip and you’ve lost every single picture, only to then find that you can’t remember a thing about the evening for yourself…because you were too busy making sure your camera was on the right settings for the light, or focusing correctly. Not a single memory of sight or sound or smell or touch, and no-one to blame but yourself.

When did we become so reliant on our cameras, our iPads, our fancy phones, I wonder?

Take a moment to stop and notice your surroundings. Take in the details with your own eyes rather than the megapixels of your iPhone, and remember those vibrant colours. Take a deep breath and let yourself hear more than the snap of a camera phone.

Life moves so fast these days. Everyone wants to find the fastest, most efficient way of performing even the most everyday tasks; like telling the time, for example. Modern technology is a wonderful thing, and I certainly couldn’t be without it, but reliable it ain’t. That moment when your phone inexplicably crashes or freezes? It’s happened more times than I care to recall over the last twelve months.

How many times has Big Ben broken in that time, I wonder?